CINCINNATI — Daryl Baldwin was born around the time that his Miami Tribe of Oklahoma was losing
its last generation of fluent speakers and facing the possibility that its language would die with
them.

Fifty years later, a project that Baldwin directs at Miami University is making headway
reclaiming and revitalizing the Myaamia language, through a collaboration that linguists across the
country say is an outstanding role model to help save dormant languages from extinction. The
collaborative project between the tribe and its namesake university recently became a full-fledged
center on the Oxford campus, a move that university and linguists say enhances the project’s
efforts and expands access to grants and other resources.

“In 2001, I started out with just a desk in the library,” said Baldwin, the founding director of
the center that now has full-time and part-time staff and student assistance.

The center serves as a research and development arm for the tribe, conducting research to help
preserve the language and culture and developing educational materials to help with that. It has
produced such tools as an online dictionary and mobile apps to help people learn and speak the
language.

Tribal officials are pleased with the new center that they say gives more permanency to the
effort to preserve their language and culture.

“It assures us that this will go on for a long time,” said Julie Olds, cultural resources
officer at the tribe’s Miami, Okla., headquarters.

The Miami name is derived from the original Myaamia. The Myaamia people inhabited land now
within the borders of Ohio — including the region where the university now stands — and Illinois,
Indiana and parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Government relocations forced the tribe into
territories that later became Kansas and Oklahoma.

The center grew out of a more than 40-year-old relationship between the university and the
tribe, which has about 4,000 members and fewer resources than larger Native American groups working
to save their languages.

But tribal officials say the university partnership has provided research and development tools
that the tribe would not have had otherwise and sparked a new desire — especially among young
tribal members — to learn about their language and culture.

Although it’s difficult to determine how many people are now fluent in the language, “at least
it is now being used again,” Olds said. She said language and culture camps and workshops growing
out of the partnership also are drawing young people, and even older ones.

“It’s all about restoring knowledge to the Myaamia community, and the center is key,” Olds
said.